Public Opinion and Liberal Principles
Conjectures and Refutations, Chapter 17
by Karl Popper

The following remarks were designed to provide material for debate at an
international conference of liberals (in the English sense of this term:
see the end of the Preface). My purpose was simply to lay the
foundations for a good general discussion. Because I could assume
liberal views in my audience I was largely concerned to challenge,
rather than to endorse, popular assumptions favourable to these views.


1. The Myth of Public Opinion

We should beware of a number of myths concerning ‘public opinion’ which
are often accepted uncritically.

There is, first, the classical myth, vox populi vox dei, which
attributes to the voice of the people a kind of final authority and
unlimited wisdom. Its modern equivalent is faith in the ultimate
common-sense rightness of that mythical figure, ‘the man in the street’,
his vote, and his voice. The avoidance of the plural in both cases is
characteristic. Yet people are, thank God, seldom univocal; and the
various men in the various streets are as different as any collection of
V.I.P.s in a conference-room. And if, on occasion, they do speak more or
less in unison, what they say is not necessarily wise. They may be
right, or they may be wrong. ‘The voice’ may be very firm on very
doubtful issues. (Example: the nearly unanimous and unquestioning
acceptance of the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’.) And it may
waver on issues over which there is hardly room for doubt. (Example: the
question whether to condone political blackmail, and mass-murder.) It
may be well-intentioned but imprudent. (Example: the public reaction
which destroyed the Hoare-Laval plan.) Or it may be neither
well-intentioned nor very prudent. (Example: the approval of the
Runciman mission; the approval of the Munich agreement of 1938.)

I believe nevertheless that there is a kernel of truth hidden in the vox
populi myth. One might put it in this way: In spite of the limited
information at their disposal, many simple men are often wiser than
their governments; and if not wiser, then inspired by better or more
generous intentions. (Examples: the readiness of the people of
Czechoslovakia to fight, on the eve of Munich; the Hoare-Laval reaction
again.)

One form of the myth—or perhaps of the philosophy behind the myth—which
seems to me of particular interest and importance is the doctrine that
truth is manifest. By this I mean the doctrine that, though error is
something that needs to be explained (by lack of good will or by bias or
by prejudice), truth will always make itself known, as long as it is not
suppressed. Thus arises the belief that liberty, by sweeping away
oppression and other obstacles, must of necessity lead to a Reign of
Truth and Goodness—to ‘an Elysium created by reason and graced by the
purest pleasures known to the love of mankind’, in the words of the
concluding sentence of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of
the Progress of the Human Mind.

I have consciously oversimplified this important myth which also may be
formulated: ‘Nobody, if presented with the truth, can fail to recognize
it.’ I propose to call this ‘the theory of rationalist optimism’. It is
a theory, indeed, which the Enlightenment shares with most of its
political offspring and its intellectual forebears. Like the vox populi
myth, it is another myth of the univocal voice. If humanity is a Being
we ought to worship, then the unanimous voice of mankind ought to be our
final authority. But we have learned that this is a myth, and we have
learned to distrust unanimity.

A reaction to this rationalist and optimistic myth is the romantic
version of the vox populi theory—the doctrine of the authority and
uniqueness of the popular will, of the ‘volonté generale’, of the spirit
of the people, of the genius of the nation, of the group mind, or of the
instinct of the blood. I need hardly repeat here the criticism which
Kant and others—among them myself—have levelled against these doctrines
of the irrational grasp of truth which culminates in the Hegelian
doctrine of the cunning of reason which uses our passions as instruments
for the instinctive or intuitive grasp of truth; and which makes it
impossible for the people to be wrong, especially if they follow their
passions rather than their reason.

An important and still very influential variant of the myth may be
described as the myth of the progress of public opinion, which is the
myth of public opinion of the nineteenth-century Liberal. It may be
illustrated by quoting a passage from Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn,
to which Professor E. H. Gombrich has drawn my attention. Trollope
describes the fate of a parliamentary motion for Irish tenant rights.
The division comes, and the Ministry is beaten by a majority of
twenty-three. ‘And now’, says Mr Monk, M.P., ‘the pity is that we are
not a bit nearer tenant-rights than we were before.’

‘But we are nearer to it.’

‘In one sense, yes. Such a debate and such a majority will make men
think. But no;—think is too high a word; as a rule men don’t think. But
it will make them believe that there is something in it. Many who before
regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that
it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time
it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among
the things probable;—and so at last it will be ranged in the list of
those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely
needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.’

‘It is not loss of time,’ said Phineas, ‘to have taken the first great
step in making it.’

‘The first great step was taken long ago,’ said Mr Monk,—‘taken by men
who were looked upon as revolutionary demagogues, almost as traitors,
because they took it. But it is a great thing to take any step that
leads us onwards.’

The theory here expounded by the radical-liberal Member of Parliament,
Mr Monk, may be perhaps called the ‘avant-garde theory of public
opinion’, or the theory of the leadership of the advanced. It is the
theory that there are some leaders or creators of public opinion who, by
books and pamphlets and letters to The Times, or by parliamentary
speeches and motions, manage to get some ideas first rejected and later
debated and finally accepted. Public opinion is here conceived as a kind
of public response to the thoughts and efforts of those aristocrats of
the mind who produce new thoughts, new ideas, new arguments. It is
conceived as slow, as somewhat passive and by nature conservative, but
nevertheless as capable, in the end, of intuitively discerning the truth
of the claims of the reformers—as the slow-moving but final and
authoritative umpire of the debates of the elite. This, no doubt, is
again another form of our myth, however much of the English reality may
at first sight appear to conform to it. No doubt, the claims of
reformers have often succeeded in exactly this way. But did only the
valid claims succeed? I am inclined to believe that, in Great Britain,
it is not so much the truth of an assertion or the wisdom of a proposal
that is likely to win for a policy the support of public opinion, as the
feeling that injustice is being done which can and must be rectified. It
is the characteristic moral sensitivity of public opinion, and the way
in which it has often been roused, at least in the past, which is
described by Trollope; its intuition of injustice rather than its
intuition of factual truth. It is debatable how far Trollope’s
description is applicable to other countries; and it would be dangerous
to assume that even in Great Britain public opinion will remain as
sensitive as in the past.


2. The Dangers of Public Opinion

Public opinion (whatever it may be) is very powerful. It may change
governments, even non-democratic governments. Liberals ought to regard
any such power with some degree of suspicion.

Owing to its anonymity, public opinion is an irresponsible form of
power, and therefore particularly dangerous from the liberal point of
view. (Example: colour bars and other racial questions.) The remedy in
one direction is obvious: by minimizing the power of the state, the
danger of the influence of public opinion, exerted through the agency of
the state, will be reduced. But this does not secure the freedom of the
individual’s behaviour and thought from the direct pressure of public
opinion. Here, the individual needs the powerful protection of the
state. These conflicting requirements can be at least partly met by a
certain kind of tradition—of which more below.

The doctrine that public opinion is not irresponsible, but somehow
‘responsible to itself’—in the sense that its mistakes will rebound upon
the public who held the mistaken opinion—is another form of the
collectivist myth of public opinion: the mistaken propaganda of one
group of citizens may easily harm a very different group.


3. Liberal Principles: A Group of Theses

(1) The state is a necessary evil: its powers are not to be multiplied
beyond what is necessary. One might call this principle the ‘Liberal
Razor’. (In analogy to Ockham’s Razor, i.e. the famous principle that
entities or essences must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary.)

In order to show the necessity of the state I do not appeal to Hobbes’
homo-homini-lupus view of man. On the contrary, its necessity can be
shown even if we assume that homo homini felis, or even that homo homini
angelus—in other words, even if we assume that, because of their
gentleness, or angelic goodness, nobody ever harms anybody else. In such
a world there would still be weaker and stronger men, and the weaker
ones would have no legal right to be tolerated by the stronger ones, but
would owe them gratitude for their being so kind as to tolerate them.
Those (whether strong or weak) who think this an unsatisfactory state of
affairs, and who think that every person should have a right to live,
and that every person should have a legal claim to be protected against
the power of the strong, will agree that we need a state that protects
the rights of all.

It is easy to see that the state must be a constant danger, or (as I
have ventured to call it) an evil, though a necessary one. For if the
state is to fulfil its function, it must have more power at any rate
than any single private citizen or public corporation; and although we
might design institutions to minimize the danger that these powers will
be misused, we can never eliminate the danger completely. On the
contrary, it seems that most men will always have to pay for the
protection of the state, not only in the form of taxes but even in the
form of humiliation suffered, for example, at the hands of bullying
officials. The thing is not to pay too heavily for it.

(2) The difference between a democracy and a tyranny is that under a
democracy the government can be got rid of without bloodshed; under a
tyranny it cannot.

(3) Democracy as such cannot confer any benefits upon the citizen and it
should not be expected to do so. In fact democracy can do nothing—only
the citizens of the democracy can act (including, of course, those
citizens who comprise the government). Democracy provides no more than a
framework within which the citizens may act in a more or less organized
and coherent way.

(4) We are democrats, not because the majority is always right, but
because democratic traditions are the least evil ones of which we know.
If the majority (or ‘public opinion’) decides in favour of tyranny, a
democrat need not therefore suppose that some fatal inconsistency in his
views has been revealed. He will realize, rather, that the democratic
tradition in his country was not strong enough.

(5) Institutions alone are never sufficient if not tempered by
traditions. Institutions are always ambivalent in the sense that, in the
absence of a strong tradition, they also may serve the opposite purpose
to the one intended. For example, a parliamentary opposition is, roughly
speaking, supposed to prevent the majority from stealing the taxpayer’s
money. But I well remember an affair in a south-eastern European country
which illustrates the ambivalence of this institution. There, the
opposition shared the spoils with the majority.

To sum up: Traditions are needed to form a kind of link between
institutions and the intentions and valuations of individual men.

(6) A Liberal Utopia—that is, a state rationally designed on a
traditionless tabula rasa—is an impossibility. For the Liberal principle
demands that the limitations to the freedom of each which are made
necessary by social life should be minimized and equalized as much as
possible (Kant). But how can we apply such an a priori principle in real
life? Should we prevent a pianist from practising, or prevent his
neighbour from enjoying a quiet afternoon? All such problems can be
solved in practice only by an appeal to existing traditions and customs
and to a traditional sense of justice; to common law, as it is called in
Britain, and to an impartial judge’s appreciation of equity. All laws,
being universal principles, have to be interpreted in order to be
applied; and an interpretation needs some principles of concrete
practice, which can be supplied only by a living tradition. And this
holds more especially for the highly abstract and universal principles
of Liberalism.

(7) Principles of Liberalism may be described (at least today) as
principles of assessing, and if necessary of modifying or changing,
existing institutions, rather than of replacing existing institutions.
One can express this also by saying that Liberalism is an evolutionary
rather than a revolutionary creed (unless it is confronted by a
tyrannical regime).

(8) Among the traditions we must count as the most important is what we
may call the ‘moral framework’ (corresponding to the institutional
‘legal framework’) of a society. This incorporates the society’s
traditional sense of justice or fairness, or the degree of moral
sensitivity it has reached. This moral framework serves as the basis
which makes it possible to reach a fair or equitable compromise between
conflicting interests where this is necessary. It is, of course, itself
not unchangeable, but it changes comparatively slowly. Nothing could be
more dangerous than the destruction of this traditional framework, as it
was consciously aimed at by Nazism. In the end its destruction will lead
to cynicism and nihilism, i.e. to the disregard and the dissolution of
all human values.


4. The Liberal Theory of Free Discussion

Freedom of thought, and free discussion, are ultimate Liberal values
which do not really need any further justification. Nevertheless, they
can also be justified pragmatically in terms of the part they play in
the search for truth.

Truth is not manifest; and it is not easy to come by. The search for
truth demands at least

-   (a) imagination
-   (b) trial and error
-   (c) the gradual discovery of our prejudices by way of (a), of (b),
    and of critical discussion.

The Western rationalist tradition, which derives from the Greeks, is the
tradition of critical discussion—of examining and testing propositions
or theories by attempting to refute them. This critical rational method
must not be mistaken for a method of proof, that is to say, for a method
of finally establishing truth; nor is it a method which always secures
agreement. Its value lies, rather, in the fact that participants in a
discussion will, to some extent, change their minds, and part as wiser
men.

It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who
have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. I think that
this is a mistake. All that is needed is a readiness to learn from one’s
partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand
what he intends to say. If this readiness is there, the discussion will
be the more fruitful the more the partners’ backgrounds differ. Thus the
value of a discussion depends largely upon the variety of the competing
views. Had there been no Tower of Babel, we should invent it. The
liberal does not dream of a perfect consensus of opinion; he only hopes
for the mutual fertilization of opinions, and the consequent growth of
ideas. Even when we solve a problem to universal satisfaction, we
create, in solving it, many new problems over which we are bound to
disagree. This is not to be regretted.

Although the search for truth through free rational discussion is a
public affair, it is not public opinion (whatever this may be) which
results from it. Though public opinion may be influenced by science and
may judge science, it is not the product of scientific discussion.

But the tradition of rational discussion creates, in the political
field, the tradition of government by discussion, and with it the habit
of listening to another point of view; the growth of a sense of justice;
and the readiness to compromise.

Our hope is thus that traditions, changing and developing under the
influence of critical discussion and in response to the challenge of new
problems, may replace much of what is usually called ‘public opinion’,
and take over the functions which public opinion is supposed to fulfil.


5. The Forms of Public Opinion

There are two main forms of public opinion; institutionalized and
non-institutionalized.

Examples of institutions serving or influencing public opinion: the
press (including Letters to the Editor); political parties; societies
like the Mont Pèlerin Society; Universities; book-publishing;
broadcasting; theatre; cinema; television.

Examples of non-institutionalized public opinion: what people say in
railway carriages and other public places about the latest news, or
about foreigners, or about ‘coloured men’; or what they say about one
another across the dinner table. (This may even become
institutionalized.)


6. Some Practical Problems: Censorship and Monopolies of Publicity

No theses are offered in this section—only problems.

How far does the case against censorship depend upon a tradition of
self-imposed censorship?

How far do publishers’ monopolies establish a kind of censorship? How
far are thinkers free to publish their ideas? Can there be complete
freedom to publish? And ought there to be complete freedom to publish
anything?

The influence and responsibility of the intelligentsia: (a) upon the
spread of ideas (example: socialism); (b) upon the acceptance of often
tyrannical fashions (example: abstract art).

The freedom of the Universities: (a) state interference; (b) private
interference; (c) interference in the name of public opinion.

The management of (or planning for) public opinion. ‘Public relations
officers.’

The problem of the propaganda for cruelty in newspapers (especially in
‘comics’), cinema, etc.

The problem of taste. Standardization and levelling.

The problem of propaganda and advertisement versus the spread of
information.


7. A Short List of Political Illustrations

This is a list containing cases which should be worthy of careful
analysis.

-   (1) The Hoare-Laval Plan and its defeat by the unreasonable moral
    enthusiasm of public opinion.
-   (2) The Abdication of Edward VIII.
-   (3) Munich.
-   (4) Unconditional surrender.
-   (5) The Crichel-Down case.
-   (6) The British habit of accepting hardship without grumbling.


8. Summary

That intangible and vague entity called public opinion sometimes reveals
an unsophisticated shrewdness or, more typically, a moral sensitivity
superior to that of the government in power. Nevertheless, it is a
danger to freedom if it is not moderated by a strong liberal tradition.
It is dangerous as an arbiter of taste, and unacceptable as an arbiter
of truth. But it may sometimes assume the role of an enlightened arbiter
of justice. (Example: The liberation of slaves in the British colonies.)
Unfortunately it can be ‘managed’. These dangers can be counteracted
only by strengthening the liberal tradition.

Public opinion should be distinguished from the publicity of free and
critical discussion which is (or should be) the rule in science, and
which includes the discussion of questions of justice and other moral
issues. Public opinion is influenced by, but neither the result of, nor
under the control of, discussions of this kind. Their beneficial
influence will be the greater the more honestly, simply and clearly,
these discussions are conducted.


Note

    This paper was read before the Sixth Meeting of the Mont Pèlerin
Society at their Conference in Venice, September 1954; it was published
(in Italian) in Il Politico, 20, 1955, and (in German) in Ordo, 8, 1956;
it has not been previously published in English.